Before the Wildcats’ season-opening series this past weekend down in Arizona, Northwestern head coach Spencer Allen mentioned that closing out games would be important for his team. As Arizona State’s three-game sweep of Northwestern showed, that might be a real problem going forward.
Despite holding the lead or being tied in the 8th inning or later in both Game 2 of Friday’s doubleheader and Sunday’s rescheduled game, the Northwestern Wildcats (0-3) dropped all three games to the Arizona State Sun Devils (3-0) at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Northwestern scored just a total of six runs all weekend.
Northwestern actually won its first two games in the 2016 season, Allen’s first, but would only win 13 the rest of the year, culminating in a 15-39 record.